CQ Today, "Bipartisan Policy Center Dives Headfirst Into the Partisan Pool"
Published By: Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff
August 26, 2008
In the midst of two of the most intensely partisan events of the year, Jason Grumet and Cameron Lynch will go against the grain, preaching bipartisanship to the party faithful gathering in Denver and St. Paul.
Democrat Grumet and Republican Lynch are trying to kindle interest in the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center with a series of parties and events at the conventions.
Grumet, founder and president of the think tank, and Lynch, its executive vice president, say they’ve been laying the groundwork for the real test next year, when a new president and Congress will have a fresh start. The center is planning a conference for new lawmakers after the election to encourage more comity, and over the next several months it will roll out policy proposals for health care, foreign affairs and transportation.
Grumet and Lynch have lined up four former Senate majority leaders to help them drive the debate: Republicans Bob Dole of Kansas (1969-96) and Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee (1967-85), and Democrats Tom Daschle of South Dakota (1987-2005) and George Mitchell of Maine (1980-95). Daschle is attending this week’s Democratic convention; Dole will be in St. Paul for the GOP gathering.
In late 2005, Grumet teamed with Lynch, a 33-year-old former aide to Dole whom he’d met while running the National Commission on Energy Policy, a project of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The idea was to replicate, on a broader scale, the success the commission had earlier this decade in bringing a bipartisan group together to tackle a difficult problem. The Bipartisan Policy Center was officially launched in March 2007.
The group set lofty goals: persuading a new administration and a new Congress to tackle some of the most intractable problems facing the country, including policy toward Iran, climate change and health care.
“We are decidedly not interested in just thinking smart thoughts and hoping someone cares,” Grumet says.
Bipartisan, Not
Post-Partisan
The past year and a half, though, has yielded few results. The commission’s ideas were incorporated into Senate climate-change legislation (S 1766) introduced by Arlen Specter , R-Pa., and Jeff Bingaman , D-N.M., that many environmentalists criticize as not being aggressive enough in its emission reduction goals.
The bill hasn’t gone anywhere, and Congress left for its August recess as torn as ever over energy policy.
The center’s leadership, admittedly, is worried that Grumet’s high-profile position advising Barack Obama on energy — and Lynch’s fundraising for John McCain — could undermine its effort to play dealmaker come January. That worry is exacerbated by high hopes among Democrats that a big sweep in the election will mean there won’t be a need to compromise with the other side.
Grumet and Lynch view that as short-sighted but say that the point of the center was never to eliminate partisanship.
“The specific goal of the organization was to be bipartisan, to not be post-partisan, nonpartisan or transpartisan,” said Lynch, “but to actually have Republicans and Democrats who believe in the core issues of their party but also believe that Washington can function better when it comes to legislating.”
The center sponsored the “Blue Night in Denver” fete honoring moderate “Blue Dog” Democrats on Sunday and partied Monday night at Vesta Dipping Grill, a restaurant in Denver’s LoDo section. In Minneapolis, Grumet and Lynch will host another party Sept. 2 and are sponsoring three nights of concerts.
“We all have our favorite teams, but we all share the sense that the next president will have a really unique and fragile opportunity to change the expectations of how we govern, and we’re pretty committed to not taking that moment for granted,” Grumet said.
